bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.26.441537; this version posted April 27, 2021. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. Genomically Mined Acoustic Reporter Genes Enable On- Demand In Vivo Monitoring of Tumor-Homing Bacteria Robert C. Hurt1,#, Marjorie T. Buss2,#, Katie Wong2, Daniel P. Sawyer1, Margaret B. Swift2, Przemysław Dutka1,2, David R. Mittelstein3, Zhiyang Jin3, Mohamad H. Abedi1, Ramya Deshpande2, Mikhail G. Shapiro2,* 1Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA 2Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA 3Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA #Equal contribution *Correspondence should be addressed to M.G.S. (
[email protected]) ABSTRACT A major outstanding challenge in the fields of biological research, synthetic biology and cell-based medicine is the difficulty of visualizing the function of natural and engineered cells noninvasively inside opaque organisms. Ultrasound imaging has the potential to address this challenge as a widely available technique with a tissue penetration of several centimeters and a spatial resolution below 100 µm. Recently, the first genetically encoded reporter molecules were developed based on bacterial gas vesicles to link ultrasound signals to molecular and cellular function. However, the properties of these first-generation acoustic reporter genes (ARGs) resulted in limited sensitivity and specificity for imaging in the in vivo context. Here, we describe second-generation ARGs with greatly improved acoustic properties and expression characteristics.